WebSemicolon Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce – Price Drop & Back in Stock Badges

Description

WebSemicolon Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce shows every shopper the products they recently viewed in your store, and tells them when something changed since their visit: the price dropped, the product is back in stock, or stock is running low. That gives visitors a concrete reason to return to a product instead of just seeing a list of thumbnails.

The history belongs to the visitor and is kept in a cookie in their own browser. Logged-in customers can also have it saved in their account, so it follows them from their phone to their laptop. No data is sent to third parties.

Features

• Grid, carousel or list. Pick the layout in the settings, per block or per shortcode. The carousel is a lightweight native scroller with previous / next buttons (touch and keyboard friendly, RTL aware) and needs no slider library.
• “Add to cart” button on every card. Uses the standard WooCommerce button, so it follows your theme and supports AJAX add to cart. Variable products show “Select options”.
• Follows customers across devices. For logged-in customers the history is merged with the cookie of the current browser and saved in their account. Guests keep using a cookie only. You can turn the account sync off, and it is covered by the WordPress personal data export and erase tools.
• Report: viewed but not purchased. A page under View History > Report lists your most viewed products with the units sold while views were being counted, so you can spot products that get attention but no sales.
• Live preview. The settings page shows a preview that updates as you change the layout, fonts, sizes and colors.
• Change badges. When a visitor returns to the list, each product can show what happened since they viewed it:
  • Price dropped (with the percentage when it is 1% or more)
  • Back in stock
  • Only N left (uses your WooCommerce low-stock threshold)
  • Out of stock
• Works with page caching. Views are recorded and the list is loaded in the browser through a small AJAX request, so the page HTML is identical for every visitor and can be cached by any page cache or CDN. A plugin that builds the list while the page is generated cannot do this, because cached pages skip PHP entirely and the view is never recorded.
• Three ways to display it.
  • A “Recently Viewed Products” block for the block editor, with settings in the sidebar.
  • The [product_view_history_for_woocommerce] shortcode for classic editors, page builders and templates.
  • Automatic placement with no shortcode needed: below the product details on single product pages, on an empty cart page, on a shop page with no results, and on the order received (thank you) page.
• Always the newest first. Viewing a product again moves it back to the front of the list.
• Hides what should not be shown. The product currently being viewed is left out of the list, and products set to “hidden” in catalog visibility are skipped. Products without an image use the WooCommerce placeholder image.
• Appearance settings. Choose the font, the text sizes, the number of columns, the corner radius and every color (section, cards, text, price and each badge) from the settings page with the WordPress color picker. Only system fonts are offered, so no font files are loaded from external servers.
• Responsive grid. Up to 6 columns on desktop (5 by default), up to 3 on tablets and 2 on phones.
• RTL ready. The layout uses logical CSS properties, so it mirrors correctly on right-to-left sites. A complete Persian (fa_IR) translation is included, also for the block editor.
• Lightweight and clean. One small script and a few lines of inline CSS are loaded only on pages that show the list or on single product pages (to record the view). No custom database tables, no external requests, and all settings and stored data are removed when the plugin is deleted.
• Compatible with High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS).

How it works

1. A visitor opens a product page. The plugin records the product, together with its price, stock status and the time of the view, in a cookie (up to 10 products, kept for 30 days). For logged-in customers the same list is saved in their account.
2. On any page that shows the list, the plugin asks the server for the visitor’s products, compares each one with how it looked at the time of the visit and builds the layout you chose.
3. If a product changed in a way worth mentioning, one badge is shown on its card. Badge priority: back in stock, price dropped, out of stock, low stock.
4. Each product page view is also added to an anonymous per-product counter used by the report.

Settings

Open View History in the admin menu to set the default number of products (1 to 10), the section title, the layout, whether to show prices, the “Add to cart” button and the change badges, whether to sync history for logged-in customers, and where to display the list automatically. The Appearance section controls fonts, sizes, columns, corner radius and colors, with a live preview. The count, title, layout, price, “Add to cart” and badge options can be overridden per block or per shortcode.

Usage

Default shortcode:

[product_view_history_for_woocommerce]

Shortcode with attributes:

[product_view_history_for_woocommerce limit="6" title="Recently Seen" layout="carousel" show_price="no" badges="no" add_to_cart="yes"]

Attributes (all optional, the defaults come from the plugin settings):

• limit – number of products, 1 to 10.
• title – section title.
• layout – grid, carousel or list.
• show_price – yes or no.
• badges – yes or no. Turns the change badges on or off.
• add_to_cart – yes or no. Shows the WooCommerce “Add to cart” button on each product.

Privacy

The plugin sets one first-party cookie when a visitor opens a single product page:

• Name: product_view_history_for_woocommerce
• Content: a short list (up to 10) of product IDs, with the price and stock status each product had when it was viewed and the time of the view. It contains no name, email, IP address or user ID.
• Lifetime: 30 days.
• Flags: HttpOnly, SameSite=Lax, and Secure on HTTPS sites.

The cookie is used only to show the visitor their own recently viewed products. No data is sent to any external service. Depending on where your visitors live, you may need to list this cookie as a functional cookie in your cookie notice or privacy policy.

Other data the plugin stores:

• Logged-in customers (optional): the same short list is saved in the customer’s user meta (product_view_history_for_woocommerce_items) so it follows them across devices. It is included in the WordPress personal data export, removed by the personal data erase tool, and removed when the plugin is deleted. It can be turned off in the settings.
• Product view counters: each product has an anonymous view count (_pvh_views) used by the report. It is not linked to any visitor.

The plugin adds suggested text for your privacy policy under Settings > Privacy.